Ever Lasting Search Battles

Search engines catch a lot of flack for various things, some of the items which top the list are privacy concerns, spam issues, and irrelevant search results. The laundry list of complaints and concerns that users come up with about the engines is as varied as the user, and can sometimes border on the silly; like the recent court case Google won.

All things being even though, the complaints do have some merit as there are lingering issues with search and the results pages. There are some unscrupulous users out there that try and ruin it for the rest of us by gaming the search engines. Cloaking pages, hidden links, scraping genuinely great content and sometimes even just running a content generator that spits out nonsense. At a recent event, Matt Cutts came out and discussed some of the top issues that Google actively works on keeping from their search results. Some of the ones that you would expect are in the list, spam content that was auto generated, this usually reads like nonsense and is stuff to the brim with keywords. Not surprisingly, keyword stuffing also made that short list of immediate no-no’s, where SEO is concerned this is even a basic of the basics, you just don’t do it. As it should be expected, pages that are full of nonsense text for no reason at all, it isn’t too difficult to find unfortunately, as you can just run a search for “Lorem ipsum” and you’ll be able to find too many poor businesses out there who have no idea they’re being swindled.

One of the methods that was discussed which is still an issue online, is full on hacking of websites. It started when the web was born, and will likely always exist in some form or another. There are many different levels of hacking, and not all of them are malicious, web developers have been having to deal with Internet Explorer for years with some of these methods. But there are still malicious hackers out there, who will attempt to seize your website and use it to their advantage. You can deter most attempts however just by following safe web practices and ensuring your website software is up to date, and by taking the time to actually look at your own website from time to time. If something looks wrong, investigate and fix it before it becomes an issue.

Search engines and the internet are still very young technologies if you really break down the numbers, they have a lot of evolving to go through in their lifetime. There is clearly some massive potential for growth in all sectors, search, websites, and information sharing, etc, and for as many innovations we make there will be users who try to take advantage. Be aware of your website and it’s content, and try to keep in touch with your website admin and your SEO provider, you’ll be thankful you did.